Why the Big Easy has gone furthest with the charter experiment

WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, right at the start of the school year, thousands of students across Orleans Parish saw their classes delayed. Teachers were displaced, and so were parents; the schools themselves were festering, where they were not destroyed. Even before the levees broke the schools were struggling, as the city was. More than two-thirds of pupils in the public system attended schools that were officially failing. In the high schools, fewer than half could pass their graduating exams.

Six years on, it appears that Katrina was catalytic. Reformers had been fretting over New Orleans schools for years. In 2003, for example, the state created a Recovery School District (RSD) to take over failing schools. In July 2005 the Knowledge Is Power Programme, a national network of charter schools, opened its first outpost in Orleans Parish. But after the storm these efforts had a new urgency.

The state legislature declared the Orleans Parish district to be in “academic crisis” and, on that basis, authorised the RSD to assume control over more than 100 schools. Some were permanently closed, some taken on by the RSD, and some reconfigured as charters overseen by the state. They were joined by a cluster of other charters, supported by federal and state funds but independently operated.

At the end of the last school year, more than two-thirds of public-school students in New Orleans were enrolled in charter schools of one form or another. The shift has led to some gains. The RSD schools (most of which are charters) posted a 20% gain in state achievement tests between 2007 and 2010. And although 26% of New Orleans's public schools were deemed academically unacceptable by the state department of education in 2010, that was a sharp fall from 42% the year before.

So the city schools have done decently, especially in the face of continuing difficulties. A July 2011 report from the Cowen Institute at Tulane University notes that New Orleans schools receive significantly more funding per pupil than the state average, about $13,000 compared with $10,700 a year. That gap will narrow as the recovery takes root. Meanwhile, they could use the money. Even before Katrina, a third of all schoolchildren in New Orleans were in private or parochial schools, compared with a national average of 11%. In the public system, more than 80% of pupils get free lunches, a proxy for poverty.

The charter-school experiment in New Orleans raises the question of why more cities and states have not followed its example. But there are problems. Georgia, for example, has more than 120 such schools. But it has got bogged down in legal arguments over whether the state, or local government, has the power to grant or revoke charters. Elsewhere, charters have never caught on. Mississippi has only one. In a recent interview the governor, Haley Barbour, said that he would love to see more but that legislative efforts to establish them were blocked by black legislators who worried that such a system might lead to de facto segregation.

This complaint annoys supporters, who point out that nationally most pupils in charter schools are black or Latino. But it is not an abstract issue in Mississippi, where demographic clustering has left many schools more racially homogeneous than the state itself. And the same concern simmers elsewhere. In May the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People joined a teachers' union in New York to file a lawsuit to block 20 new charter schools in the city. On July 21st a judge ruled in favour of the schools.

The controversy points to a broader factor that may have helped in New Orleans. One of the common complaints against charter schools is that those who do not get into them are left behind in “sink schools”. The school system in New Orleans was so bad, however, and the city so beleaguered, that a wholesale change was possible. It would be difficult, and undesirable, to replicate those conditions. Experiments may have to wait.